This morning I was slow to get out of bed because of the long day of diving we had the day before. I went down to breakfast and found that I wasn’t the only one feeling this way. Everyone was more silent today than normal, and it seemed like jumping into the water could be our only way to wake up. We arrived at our dive site, one next to the first dive yesterday, and jumped into the cooler deep water. The water woke me up quickly and I was ready to go. Our entire group was able to go into a small tunnel that required us to be in a single file line. The walls were decorated with different colors of coral that we really only noticed when Lucy turned on her dive light. While the entrance was at about 45 feet, the exit was at around 80 feet, which caused the water to get colder and everything to get darker. Immediately after exiting the tunnel, a small turtle swam right in front of us and circled a few times before disappearing into the deep. I was able to identify the turtle as a hawksbill sea turtle because of the jagged edges of its shell and beak shaped face. The hawksbill is also one of the smallest species of sea turtle, allowing them to fit into smaller spaces in reefs. We continued on around the reef and then headed back towards the boat through a sandy area full of creatures that looked like grass. When I got closer, they slowly retracted into the sand. There were hundreds of them across the sandy bottom. They were garden eels, and they live in the sand were they eat zooplankton that come to the sand. These eels almost never leave their burrows completely, and they can get up to 27 inches long. Our next dive was much more shallow and had a large coral overhang that we followed. The overhang held some of the most purple sponge coral I have seen on a dive. It is identifiable by its tall tube shape and purple color. My favorite part about the sponge coral was not the coral itself though, but the small crabs and shrimp and fish that lived inside of them. Finding these small creatures made the dive more exciting.
